Sorting a list of strings in Python
python, sorting, string
Solution
Use case-insensitive comparison:
>>> sorted(['Dog', 'bicycle', 'cow', 'doctor', 'Car', 'Boat',
'apple', 'Airplane'], key=str.lower)
['Airplane', 'apple', 'bicycle', 'Boat', 'Car', 'cow', 'doctor', 'Dog']
This is actually the way suggested on the python wiki about sorting:
Starting with Python 2.4, both list.sort() and sorted() added a key parameter to specify a function to be called on each list element prior to making comparisons.
For example, here's a case-insensitive string comparison:
>>> sorted("This is a test string from Andrew".split(), key=str.lower)
['a', 'Andrew', 'from', 'is', 'string', 'test', 'This']
Problem
Possible Duplicate: How do I sort a list of strings in Python? How do I sort unicode strings alphabetically in Python? I have a list of strings `list` and want to sort it alphabetically. When I call `list.sort()` the first part of the list contains the entries starting with upper case letters sorted alphabetically, the second part contains the sorted entries starting with a lower case letter. Like so: ``` Airplane Boat Car Dog apple bicycle cow doctor ``` I googled for an answer but didn't came to a working algorithm. I read about the `locale` module and the `sort` parameters `cmp` and `key`. Often there was this `lambda` in a row with `sort`, which made things not better understandable for me. How can I get from: ``` list = ['Dog', 'bicycle', 'cow', 'doctor', 'Car', 'Boat', 'apple', 'Airplane'] ``` to: ``` Airplane apple bicycle Boat Car cow doctor Dog ``` Characters of foreign languages should be taken into account (like ä, é, î).